If you believe that in 50 years time you will spend your holidays lying on a beach or sunbathing on a deck chair on a cruise, you will probably be wrong.

By 2060 mankind will not have holidays because they will spend all their free time fighting against the billions and billions of jellyfish that will invade the world after global warming caused both by the burning of fossil fuels and by people smoking outside the restaurants.

The good thing is that by then, people will not be concerned about the way they travel from one place to another, because they will be transported in the ‘Light Capsule’, a kind of bulb where people will get in and will travel through tunnels and oceans like an electron inside a wire, travelling at 300,000 km/s, the speed of light. So they will travel from one part to the earth to the opposite one in just 7 hundredths of a second.

As soon as he got out of the car, Martin felt uneasy. His new secretary had just left him at his house. But before going into his new apartment, he preferred to walk for a while and think about the events of that Monday.

That day was going to be another hard and boring Monday in his office. But when he opened his dairy and realised that it was February 14th, he cheered up thinking that in spite of being Monday, it will be delightful to see how the women in his department will spend their working day speaking about Valentine’s Day.

So, the day passed as was anticipated, till a delivery woman appeared with a bunch of flowers coming toward him. He signed the receipt and opened the small card that went with the bunch. Then, while he noticed that he was going red, he read in a very striking pink ink the phrase: ‘Have a Lovely Day’, and just that, without any signature on it.

Suddenly when he finished his stroll and was inserting the key into the keyhole of his house, he realized why he had felt uneasy some minutes before when he had left his secretary’s car. When he shut the car door, he had seen through the window, a pink pen on the glove compartment.

At Edinburgh’s Camera Obscura(2)

It was three o’clock in the morning when the phone rang….

….At first Catherine thought that the phone was ringing in her dream, because she usually turned her mobile off each night before going to bed. When a few seconds later she continued hearing the mobile, she realised that it wasn’t a dream at all and suddenly, in a hurry, she ran to the hall where the mobile was. But unfortunately when she picked the mobile up, it was in silence.

The mobile screen displayed an unknown number for her, so she thought that someone had made a mistake, or perhaps it could have been one of these nuisance companies with some offer, the reason why she decided to turn her mobile off each night a long time ago. Anyway, when she was deciding whether to leave the mobile on or turn it off, she got a text message which informed her that she had a voice message on the answerphone.

‘Hello hen, it’s me, your mum. I’m calling you from Skype because I can’t find my mobile anywhere, and you know that I am nobody without my lovely iPhone. Oh my God, have you realised what time is it? sorry, sorry, my darling, continue sleeping’

From then on, Catherine always, always, checked that had turned her mobile off before going to sleep. Just in case.

(2) This image belong to a photo that I took here a couple of Christmas ago. And it is by Rob Gosalves.